I look at the hand holding the pen, and for a moment, I do not know whose hand it is. It belongs to the room. It belongs to the silence that breathes between the furniture. We have spent so much time—centuries, perhaps, or just since this morning—trying to separate ourselves from the stucco of the walls, from the damp soil outside, from the person sitting across the train car.

What a strange, exhausting fatigue it is, this modern sickness. The disease of wanting to become special.

We walk through the world like children demanding a mirror that reflects only us, taller and brighter than the rest. But it is a violent effort, this striving to stand out. It is a desperate, clawing movement toward the surface. By living on the skin of things for so long, our entire existence has become a frantic negotiation to be extraordinary. We want to be a monument. But a monument is only stone, cold and terribly alone, standing out like a sore thumb against the sky.

And yet, the secret—the terrifying, magnificent secret—is that we were already finished before we began. We have ignored the heavy, silent value of the uniqueness of our own being. To be unique is not to be better; it is simply to exist in a way that cannot be repeated. A leaf is unique, but it does not compete with the branch.

The mind, that small and anxious animal, does not understand the silence. It only understands the ledger. It sits in its dark corner, comparing, calculating, cutting the world into pieces of “more” and “less.”

The moment this comparison comes, competition starts.

And in that precise instant, the life sense—that raw, vibrating current of simply being alive—evaporates. The world ceases to be a reality to be felt and becomes a game to be won. We lose the taste of water because we are measuring the glass.

It is a grand, ridiculous comedy, isn’t it? That we have built a world so intricate, so noisy with ambition, that we now have to teach human beings how to be human. We have to write books and speak in quiet rooms to remind people of their own original nature. We must hold their hands and whisper, “Look, you are breathing. You are already here.” All because they are too busy trying to outdo the ghost of someone else.

There are those who need boundaries. They need the architecture of fear to keep them from falling into the abyss.
Religion is for all those who are afraid to go to hell. It is a contract signed in the daylight to keep the night at bay.

But spirituality? No, spirituality is not a contract. It is the language of the shipwrecked. It is for all those who were already in hell. Those who have tasted the ash, who have looked into the dark mirror of their own nothingness and found that the floor of hell is not bottomless—it is where the ego finally cracks open.

To enter the spiritual dimension is not to ascend a throne. It is to surrender the crown entirely. It is to fail at being special so magnificently that you have no choice left but to melt. To become the air, the dust, the person you despised, the dog howling in the alley. Not to stand apart, but to be swallowed by existence and find, with a shock of gratitude, that you were the existence all along.

© Beatriz Esmer